"The idea that innovation happens because you put science in one end of the pipe and technology comes out the other end goes back to Francis Bacon, and it is largely wrong. History shows that (public) science is the daughter of (private) technology at least much as it is the mother. Good universities recognise this and adjust their research programmes to what interests industry. The steam engine led to the insights of thermodynamics, not vice versa. The dye industry drove chemistry. The centrifuge and X-ray crystallography, developed for the textile industry, led to the structure of DNA."